Twitter: Understand the reasons for limiting post reading – 07/02/2023 – Tech

After a barrage of criticism, the owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, announced that he will increase the daily limit for reading posts on the social network. Now, unverified accounts will be able to read up to 1,000 tweets a day, 400 more than initially anticipated.

Hours later, the billionaire mocked the criticism. “In yet another exercise in irony, this post reached record views!” Musk said of the tweet announcing the new limitations.

He also retweeted a post by a so-called user who presents himself as an “Elon Musk parody”, claiming that Twitter users are addicted to the network and his goal is to get them off screens. “I’m doing a good deed for the world here,” the tweet read.

Read limits vary by account status and are higher for people who subscribe to “Twitter Blue”, known as “verified users”. Since last Saturday, platform users have the following limitations:

• Verified Accounts: reading up to 10,000 posts per day;
• Unverified accounts: reading up to 1,000 posts per day;
• New unverified accounts: reading up to 500 posts per day.

According to Musk himself, the measure is temporary and aims to combat “extreme levels” of data scraping on Twitter.

A day earlier, on Friday (30), the social network started to block public tweets from people who are not connected to the social network, in another action to prevent the collection of information from its users.

After the announcement of the limit of views, the billionaire’s name became the most commented subject on the social network. In second place, appeared the term “RIP Twitter” (rest in peace, Twitter, in English), with users lamenting the decision and decreeing the death of the social network.

Some former Twitter executives also criticized the decision. Esther Crawford, who was director of product management until Musk fired her in February, tweeted on Sunday: “Arrogance + no resistance – customer empathy – data = great way to ignite billions.”

Brawl with AI chatbots

The changes come amid a spat between Elon Musk and generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard, which have enjoyed a boom in popularity in recent months and are powered by data scraped from the internet.

In the case of GPT-3, the foundation of ChatGPT, there are billions of texts extracted from books and the internet. The system, or model, is capable of noticing patterns of word associations in writing to generate new texts. He uses, in part of the process, feedback from humans: people who evaluate the algorithm’s responses and help say what is good and what is not.

“Almost every company that uses AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, collect massive amounts of data,” Musk wrote on Friday. “It’s quite irritating to have to bring a large number of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate the outrageous evaluation of some AI startup.”

The billionaire also said that data collection by third parties on Twitter was reaching extreme levels and harming users of the platform.

In April, Musk was involved in a conflict and threatened to sue Microsoft after the Windows giant removed the social network from its ad platform, by refusing to pay fees for accessing the data system on Twitter. The justification for charging was precisely the use of data for training generative artificial intelligence.

Twitter isn’t the only one trying to fight chatbots’ use of data. The social network in the Reddit forum format had also announced in April that it would start charging for access to its data delivery system, whose technical name is API.

The founder and chief executive of Reddit, Steve Huffman, said at the time that the information contained on the social network was valuable and did not need to be given away for free to the largest companies in the world. The measure was also adopted by Twitter a month earlier, but the company did not cite generative artificial intelligence as a motivation for the charge.

Reddit is collaboratively run by volunteer administrators who were outraged by the news and responded with a boycott. Overnight, several questions and answers hosted on the platform were no longer available.

Musk says he wants to compete with ChatGPT and Bard

Amid the popularization of artificial intelligence chatbots, Musk has already stated that he is working on an artificial intelligence to compete with ChatGPT and Bard.

According to the British newspaper Financial Times, the owner of Twitter even gathered a team of researchers and AI engineers and discussed with investors from SpaceX and Tesla about the possibility of financing for the new technology.

In an interview, Musk himself said that he seeks to counter the efforts of Microsoft and Google with an artificial intelligence that “seeks the truth” and avoids political correctness.

“I’m going to release something called TruthGPT, or an AI that seeks absolute truth and tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said.

The billionaire was one of the founders of OpenAI, responsible for ChatGPT. He stepped aside in 2018 citing a conflict of interest with his car maker, Tesla, which would invest more in artificial intelligence.